Introductory Audio Book Podcast, Relationship Secrets from the Trenches

Introductory audio book podcast, with commentary, from The Sexual Education of a Beauty Queen – Relationship Secrets from the Trenches.

THE METHODS I’ve used to help women get what they want were all mined over many years. A wild ride where I learned relationship secrets from the trenches, going places I was always warned a lady shouldn’t go and if she did the price paid would be expensive.

When you present yourself as having answers people should consider for their own life, as I have been for over 20 years now, it can be helpful, if surprising, to find where it began, including the history women have made to make it all possible.

Where I find myself today is writing and speaking about women’s choices and how they make a life in a culture that has cracked open for us all.

To speak about the life a woman leads today is to consider the culture in which we find ourselves, from the web to social media, to movies and television.

As 2015 begins, I’ll be reading from, and discussing, the topics found in my latest book, which is the most personal I’ve ever written, going deeper than I’ve ever had courage to before.

[…] To associate the story of Fifty Shades of Grey with “violence against women”is to say consensual exploration meant to test the limits of our pleasure threshold is tantamount to a crime. It’s preposterous, but what’s worse is that it continues to infantilize women as human beings incapable of curiosity and the sense to protect themselves when adventuring into the boundless pleasure we can experience if we trust and let go with a partner.

I was a pioneer in the online sex and dating worlds, going back to the 1990s. I’ve seen victimization and have written about it in my books, some of which was highlighted in the Showtime documentary Sexy Baby. I advised women on relationships for years, talked to men about pornography, as well as women in the adult industry. In a country that refuses to accept that religion’s role and traditional relationships have shifted dramatically, blame for young women’s choices has many roots.

Fifty Shades of Grey depicts two unlike people drawn to one another through physical chemistry, where the man is the abused one and the woman heals him through meeting him on his sexual playground, finding she has a hedonistic vein, too, which she chooses to explore with him. Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey excavate sex and love, creating a tied in a bow fantasy ending, which is as unnecessary as it is contrived, but perhaps it helps make more people comfortable. […]